Meta has removed 60k Instagram accounts linked to sextortion scams based in Nigeria.

MediaPost reported that Meta in response to longstanding criticism around its efforts to protect users of its family of social media apps, it recently launched various “sextortion” prevention tools to remove accounts linked to sextortion scams on Instagram.

“Like many crimes, financial sextortion crosses borders, and over recent years there’s been a growing trend of scammers — largely driven by cybercriminals known as Yahoo Boys — targeting people across the internet, both with these and other types of scams,” Meta explains in a blog post.

“They targeted primarily adult men in the U.S. and used fake accounts to mask their identities,” the company says, adding that it identified the “sextorters” with “new technical signals” and in-depth investigations conducted by Meta’s expert teams.

Through the investigation, Meta also saw accounts attempting to target minors, which it says it has reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other tech companies via Lantern, a program run by the Tech Coalition that enables technology companies to share signals about accounts and behavior that violate their child-safety policies.

With this most recent mass removal of scammers, Meta says, it was able to understand more about the techniques being used to improve its automated detection tools.

In addition to its removal of thousands of Instagram accounts, Meta also removed around 7,200 assets, including 1,300 Facebook accounts, 200 Facebook Pages and 5,700 Facebook Groups based in Nigeria that were providing tips for conducting scams in the form of sell scripts, scam guides and links to collections of photos to use when populating fake accounts.

When Meta first announced its plan to prevent sextortion scams in April, some advocates for child safety called it a PR stunt, highlighting the company’s previous failures to protect children from predators and sexual exploitation on their apps, sharing personal trauma about losing children to suicide in the face of sexual and romance scams.

Sextortion and romance scams are among the most harmful kinds of online crime, as they target vulnerable and desperate people with promises of something that will never eventuate.

Unfortunately, scammers can evolve, and in the age of AI, there are now new vectors for them to tap into to initiate their schemes.

Hopefully, Meta will also be able to evolve its systems in line, in order to maintain some type of balance in control and enforcement.